Tag Archives: cell phone apps

All music stored in your Cloud Drive can now be played on both your iPhone and iPod with a dedicated app just released by Amazon. The free app allows users of iOS devices to stream or download music stored online in an Amazon Cloud account.

Cloud Player lets you manage and create playlists, and play music already stored on your mobile devices. This initial version allows you to transfer your iTunes purchases. It won’t let you buy new tunes through the app just yet.

Amazon customers get 5GB of free cloud storage and can buy additional space, including 20GB for $20/year or 50GB for $50/year. Users who buy a storage plan receive unlimited space for MP3 and AAC (.m4a) music files at no additional cost. According to Amazon, this offer is scheduled to end soon.

With the SceneTap app launching here in just a month, you might want to get ready to use it in order to find out which clubs and bars are going to be worth your time on the weekends. The app will allow for users of Android and unlocked iphone 4 to take a look at the bars before they even go out on the town. They will be looking at different bars across the area using cameras that are already set up to give users an idea of what the crowd might look like on the bar on any given night, given users a real look at the demographics of the bar before they go.

They are also adding some commentary into the app. To downplay the privacy concerns, they will not be providing any of the real steams from the bars so you do not have to worry about the privacy. You should also know that nothing is being recorded by the app. In the beginning, the app will look to cover about 50 clubs in the beginning in the Chicago area.

They are expected to push this farther and cover more clubs in the future, but it will be a slow crawl from one pub to another, as some users of the app will likely do. The app has been heralded as a new type of social network that focuses only on nightlife. You can bet that they will look to also take a look at user reviews of different bars to get an idea of what works and what does not. This is one app that will probably get quite a bit of use from cell phone users such as Motorola Cliq unlocked, Samsung Captivate, etc. that are looking to go out on the weekends. They provide some really interesting stats about what is out there and what kind of people are at each of the bars.

Google always says that you should do no evil, but that hasn’t stopped Facebook from engaging in some relatively shady business tactics, according to some sources over the course of the last few days. Facebook reportedly launched a smear campaign against Google in an effort to influence members of the media to write about data that Google was collecting and using from users. Facebook has all but confirmed the rumors through swift denials of the reports that have been out there.

Reportedly, Facebook hired the PR firm Burson-Marsteller to release information to journalists about the fact that Google has been retaining personal information about users and using it ways that they have not made clear.

There is only one thing that this could possibly mean - Google has something here that Facebook feels is a threat to them. Just when it appeared that Facebook was going to be able to take over the whole of the Internet through integrating their services into websites around the web, you can bet that Google is not going to be going down without a fight. Facebook has 500 million users, but you can not make it to that level without playing dirty occasionally and sending the competition some jabs to the stomach.

Their plan unravelled when a blogger that they sent the emails to decided to publish the emails online. This is something that they definitely should have seen coming and definitely was a miscalculation on their part.

This is not the first time that both companies have faced off and although they both deny their never ending feud in public, their actions have made their attention more than clear in most cases. This is one of the most direct attacks that either company has taken on the other, so you can bet that they will be retaliating at some point and time for this direct attack against Google.

Although the days when you might pack up your wallet and head to the CD store to purchase new music are gone, soon too the days of downloading music could be a thing of the past as well. In a time where seemingly everything is moving to the cloud, you have to bet that music will be one of the first industries to make the jump. Music can be easily stored and streamed through the cloud, and everyone wants access to their songs here and now, unwilling to wait for their songs to download or drive to the store to get a hold of them.

It looks as though a number of streaming music services are going to launch here fairly soon that should make for a fairly competitive industry. As things stand right now, Pandora is the undisputed leader in this market at a reasonable yearly price and a large selection of songs and playlists for their users to choose from. Other service including Zune Pass, Amazon Cloud Player and Napster have also gone with unlimited streaming plans for low monthly fees. It looks as though the future of this industry will be determined by the company that is able to capture the most mobile platforms.

The ability to stream music to your cell phone also means that you will be able to listen to virtually anything in your car as you are driving thanks to the various hook ups that these devices have. The price points of these various streaming services are all fairly in line with one another, with the most expensive being Zune Pass, which currently costs $15 per month. With many users moving toward streaming their music through the cloud, the streaming solution that positions themselves in a position to make it easiest on the end user stands to gain the most in the long run.